The idea of a global geoengineering solution to "solve" climate change is seductive to some who believe it will allow people to continue to operate on a business as usual basis.  Convenient though this might be,  there are however many risks, e.g.:  1. natural systems are interlinked and interdependent in ways that are often not fully understood.  A geoengineering solution may cause an unforeseen feedback loop that creates different and possibly worse problems and cannot be undone. 2. Most geoengineering solutions address the symptoms not the cause.  If the treatment is stopped, there may be a much steeper gradient to be tolerated between the ameliorated situation and the background level of warning.  The rate and magnitude of change could be even greater than the present business as usual trajectory.  There is some interesting literature on this topic now e.g. the book by Clive Hamilton "Earthmasters".  See  http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/books/earthmasters-the-dawn-of-the-age-of-climate-engineering-by-clive-hamilton/2002756.article 

The idea of a global geoengineering solution to "solve" climate change is seductive to some who believe it will allow people to continue to operate on a business as usual basis.  Convenient though this might be,  there are however many risks, e.g.:  1. natural systems are interlinked and interdependent in ways that are often not fully understood.  A geoengineering solution may cause an unforeseen feedback loop that creates different and possibly worse problems and cannot be undone. 2. Most geoengineering solutions address the symptoms not the cause.  If the treatment is stopped, there may be a much steeper gradient to be tolerated between the ameliorated situation and the background level of warning.  The rate and magnitude of change could be even greater than the present business as usual trajectory.  There is some interesting literature on this topic now e.g. the book by Clive Hamilton "Earthmasters".  See  http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/books/earthmasters-the-dawn-of-the-age-of-climate-engineering-by-clive-hamilton/2002756.article 

Liz Dovey, I do agree with you about the impacts of geoengineering will have on nature. Yes, it might "solve" our carbon dioxide and solar forcing input but as you've said natural system are interlinked and intervention could cause 'domino effect' of Earth's climate system. Most of the literatures I've read discussed the same thing as well. Nonetheless, thank you for the response.

p/s: There is an existence of recent New York Times article that wrote about the U.S National Academy of Science pushes for more research on geoengineering. 

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/02/11/science/panel-urges-more-research-on-geoengineering-as-a-tool-against-climate-change.html

Bryan,

Proponents can be broadly classified into two groups. People who lay more emphasis on personality and cultivate the ego, deduce that man's mandate is to dominate and subdue nature to advance one's own agenda. The other camp contains men who have realized the omniscience of nature over their own egos and man's own dependence on nature for his very survival. While the concept of Geoengineering appeals to the first group, the second group would oppose it and opt for sustainable close-to-nature systems and plans. Both paths address the concern of resource use but whereas the first groups' actions with Geoengineering will surely generate unwanted side-effects-imbalancing the environment, the second is benign and sustainable.

It remains to be seen which camp forwards their agenda successfully for the public to exercise their choice.

Regards

Thanks Raveendra for your inputs. Appreciate the morality discussion on geoengineering. 

Dear Bryan, you should have a look at www.climate-engineering.eu for updates. You may also use keywords for finding ethics and other topics.

For the assessment you are looking for, I would study the science-policy reports, like Royal Society 2009, Kiel Earth Institute 2011, NAS 2015 (came out a few weeks ago).

Thank you Nils, I do have the Royal Society reports with me but not the others. Appreciate the suggestions and I would definitely look at those two other reports.  

While the evidence for climate change is pervasive, human understanding of it is very limited.  I have no doubt that we could additionally "change" the climate from its current trajectory (which is due to both human and other factors).  I have tremendous doubts of our ability to control and predict the results of our tinkering.

One of the big reasons that climate change is so controversial is that the modelers have oversold their predictive abilities.  We aren't nearly as smart as we like to think we are in most areas of science.  The famous answer of "its turtles, all the way down" that an apocryphal old woman supposedly gave to some apocryphal wise man is not terrible unlike the scientific process.  Every scientific discovery leads to the question "what after that?"

Just one really simple scenario to illustrate:  We inject a bunch of aerosols into the atmosphere and seed the oceans to promote carbon uptake.  We successfully flatten out the warming, maybe even undo some of it.  So far so good.  Then a completely natural pulse of volcanism (such has happened frequently in the geologic past, not just a single eruption such as that of Tambora in 1815) adds even more aerosols to the atmosphere.  Suddenly we are on a trajectory to another ice age.  While our unintentional global warming experiment would have inadvertently saved us from this natural turn of events, our deliberate tinkering may have compounded the problem.  I all likelihood, what will really happen is that some feedback loop we didn't consider, or sufficiently understand, will come into play and foul-up our grand plan.

While we humans have proven our ability to both adapt to and manipulate our environment, our lasting successes have been in the area of adaptation, not manipulation.  If what we are currently doing to the climate is immoral and unwise, any attempts at "geo-engineering" would be even more so.  It would truly be analogous to testing a new drug for the first time by administering it to everyone on Earth.

Thank you Matthew for the inputs. You have summaries geoengineering beautifully. 

Humans in the early Holocene coped with rates of natural sea level rise that were as great as we have today.  They did so with stone-age technology and mostly hunter-gatherer life-styles.  6000 years ago the rate was 2.5 mm/year.  Agriculture and urban civilizations were developed in a time of >2mm/year sea level rise.

It is important to remember that ~1.3 mm/year of current global sea level rise is completely unrelated to human activity, including the industrialized countries.  The exact overall current rate is somewhat uncertain.  While satellite data shows a rate of 3.3 mm/year over a brief decade, it isn't at all clear how those numbers relate to the longer-term data.  It is reasonable to argue that approximately half of sea level rise in the second half of the 20th century was attributable to human activity.  Computer modeling beyond the calibration range of the models indicates an increase of the human caused component will be occurring in the 21st century, but models and the real world are not always in agreement.

I'm not sure how real the perpetrator/victim dichotomy of costs and benefits really is.  It is true that the developed countries have a possession-rich life-style that is easy to envy.  The developing countries have enjoyed tremendous "gains" in a variety of areas thanks to the technology that the developed countries have "shared" (for a price).  The flip side of this is that the developed countries' exposure to sea level rise is greater, if measured by the same standard that says they benefited the most from the emissions of CO2.  If one instead wants to measure the impacts of sea level rise in human terms, then I think that the gains of the developing countries received from 20th century technology are actually much greater than those received by the developed countries.

Make no mistake that I agree that there is great inequity as measured by material wealth and that the wealth in large measure stems from the consumption of fossil fuels.  My point is that when comparing cost and benefits of CO2 emissions it is important to be comparing material wealth to material wealth or human displacement to human displacement etc.

Climate change is just one of many challenges facing human kind.  The causes and effects are intertwined in extremely complicated ways.  It is also extremely difficult to attribute responsibility and benefit.  One example is the deforestation of huge areas of Brazil.  Is that mostly driven by foreign, developed countries?  Or is it mostly driven by Brazil itself striving for full "developed country" status in the world?  Or is it mostly driven by the laborer's quest to increase their wealth (however slightly)?  These and many others are all factors.  One of the effects is to replace CO2 sinks (the forests) with CO4/CO2 sources in the form of cattle.  But how much of a greenhouse gas source are cattle really, since they produce the greenhouse gases from grasses and grains that took carbon out of the atmosphere very recently?  Who is benefiting most from the production of those cattle?

Clearly, the entire world needs to replace much fossil fuel burning with other energy sources.  Clearly, the developed countries (especially the US) need to use less energy of any kind per capita.  Clearly, we need to cooperate to address all the human impacts of our dynamic, home planet, Earth.  One issue that I think is the biggest issue that gets glossed over for a variety of reasons is number of humans on Earth.  If there were only 1 billion of us, then perhaps we could all live a middle-class, developed country life-style.  I am extremely skeptical that 9 billion of us can.  I am also skeptical that a middle-class, developed country, life-style is actually the ideal that we should be aiming for.  Can health, security, and happiness be ours with much less in the way of material possessions and consumption than is the norm in the developed countries?  I'd like to hope so.

Geo-engineering promises to be part of the solution.  I maintain that it is just as likely (or more likely) to become part of the problem.  When it comes to the care of planet Earth, the Hippocratic Oath provides a good starting point: First do no harm.

Matthew:

The issue of using 'external' means like Geoengineering or 'internal' means like transformation of human nature are addressed in this thread.

https://www.researchgate.net/post/Is_it_time_we_shift_emphasis_from_technological_solutions_to_climate_change_focus_on_the_Human_Dimension?_tpcectx=qa_overview_asked&_trid=551ac6b0cf57d7633a8b456a_

Very nicely summarized, Matthew.